


somnus

by pajama_sama



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Domesticity, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Slavery, because dunmer, everything is bittersweet, existentialism and timelines, how being an orphic deity affects your interpersonal relationships, ugh where to start
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:42:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23436379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pajama_sama/pseuds/pajama_sama
Summary: Sometimes, the paths of two people align for a while, and something beautiful springs from that union.Sotha Sil is no stranger to the mystic and miraculous workings of Mundus, but the Vestige is something of a blindspot.Even to him.
Relationships: Sotha Sil/Female Dunmer Vestige, Sotha Sil/Female Vestige, Sotha Sil/Vestige
Comments: 8
Kudos: 71





	somnus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Irithyllians](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irithyllians/gifts).



> prompt fill: falling asleep against each other. obviously... i got carried away. haha.
> 
> (Velai belongs to the sweet @irithyllians on twitter. ♥)

Sleep and Velai Yalisveil share a strange relationship.

She’s not been treated to much of it—out of a mixture of force and necessity. The matrons of House Dres always wanted their laborers up early; from the inception of her girlhood, she’s wakened hours before dawn. She has scrubbed and cleaned and cooked and done many other unspeakable things in that hazy, untouchable stretch of time between late night and sunrise. The habit of taking minimal breaks is ingrained so very deeply that she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to break it. 

When and if she slumbers past her usual six hour mark, she comes around to a sluggish sort of panic that is completely illogical, completely out of tune with her body and mind. Even when she recognizes her bare little rooms in the Clockwork City, the child inside screams: _beware the whip! Beware the whip! Anyone in their rolls past the first bell will be subject to twenty lashes!_

In Morrowind, a slave is a slave, no matter how ashen their skin or red their eyes. Mercy is bought, or found on the edge of a blade.

It has been many years since any heavy-handed Dres luggard has dared to raise a whip to her face or back—but her soul remembers their touch and burn. It always will. 

Some things mark us too deeply to be forgotten.

  
  
  


──────

  
  
  


The entire City is Sotha Sil’s workshop, if he’s to be honest, but the practical uses of a dedicated space for research do not escape him. 

This is why he divides his time between the lab in the Basilica and his usual haunt in the Dome, alternating between the two as needed. His work is never-ending, never-ceasing, and he knows he will not finalize it before his trials here on Nirn are done. Nonetheless—as action and consequence demand—he will continue, because that is what Sotha Sil does: he endures, adapts, and persists, despite all odds. Despite all worldly grief and sorrow. Despite love and joy. 

“Do you ever rest?” Velai had once asked him, and he’d struggled to recall the last occasion he’d done so. 

Perhaps, yes, in a past life, the boy who had been Seht had once stopped to catch his breath after a morning of chasing scribs. Perhaps he’d curled up on the roof of the family’s fired-clay house, the thatch tickling at his back, as he stared up at the uncountable stars. Perhaps he’d laid his head in Nall’s lap, and drifted off to the feeling of her fingers carding through his flaxen hair. 

Perhaps.

He remembers, but not in the way most would—he is and is not Seht. Seht died long ago. He is Sotha Sil, god and not-god, mortal and immortal. Does he wish for a reversion? No. No, he doesn’t think so, even though a more sentimental analysis his feelings on the matter is beyond him presently. There is immeasurable loss locked into that part of him, a wound that will not heal. A pain that is tied up in who Seht is—and was—that is integral to the experience of _being_. It’s a fire that still burns at the core of Sotha Sil, but in a different way. 

Now, he is _more_ , though chained by the weight of his knowledge. He has the means to realize his visions, the power to keep them safe, and the fortitude to bear the strain of it. He does not need sleep or food or pleasure, though he is able to partake in any of those things should he so desire it. He is, objectively, an improvement over Seht in every way.

Strangely, he cannot determine with surety if the Vestige—Velai, as she’s insisted he call her—would agree. She is the strangest variable in the equation of his existence: he is aware of how their story will finish, what they will achieve together, and what shall be done to get there, but he cannot quite grasp at the complexities of what that intimacy means. What it will… feel like. It’s odd, being unsure about something when the totality of what he is centers around utter certitude. 

Emotions are much like music. While he is familiar with the theory—the lyrics and the mathematics of rhythm—instinctive melody escapes him rather often. Velai moves through life to that same inaudible song with the ease of a practiced dancer. She is quick to laugh and slow to anger; patient but impulsive, spontaneous but altogether predictable, and bright. Intelligent. An apt student and swift to learn. She reads voraciously, as one starved of a true education would, making no distinctions with regards to genre and length. 

Velai, a name, a noun, a person: slave turned mother turned freedman turned hero. A strange and beautiful assortment of complexes and contradictions. 

No. He would not go back.

  
  
  


──────

  
  


His library at the Dome is really quite ridiculous. 

And by ridiculous, she means outstanding and magnificently varied. Disgustingly enticing, really. Which is why she’s standing in front of one of the many shelves in nothing but a nightgown, hands on her hips, staring up quizzically at the rows of books crammed up against each other. The stone floor is cool on the soles of her feet—just being here is already erasing the turmoil of failed sleep from her mind. A bit of light reading is exactly what she needs to get back on track. 

“What would you recommend?” she says.

She expects him to stay over where he is, practically on the other side of the room, but what happens is this—fabric brushes at her shoulder, and then heat spreads over her skin, from her spine to her sides, down to her toes. He’s standing so close that she can feel the hushed rise-and-fall of his breath against her back. He smells like an unusual combination of parchment and dry incense, though there’s an underlying tang of brass; the alloy he uses in the factotums he’s so fond of is distinctive enough that she would know it anywhere.

“That depends on what you seek,” Sotha Sil tells her.

His voice is resonant and lovely, like a layered harmony; she wonders what he sounded like before he became the Father of Mysteries—she can hear just a note of whoever that man had been in his speech, but she can’t tell where it begins or ends. The only thing her body is keen on informing her about is that he is near, speaking directly into her ear, and that he is pleasantly warm. The rest is superficial. 

What had she been asking after again?

Velai clears her throat. “I’m not the pickiest person, you know,” she murmurs. 

“Irrelevant. One must have a starting point,” he replies. “Look. What interests you?”

Well, she can hardly figure _that_ out at the moment. 

“That’s my issue,” Velai says. “ _Everything_ does.”

His head dips until she can see his face out of the corner of her eye, his lips level with her cheek. He’s not wearing his helm or pauldrons; she has a plain view of his handsome, thin-featured face, the silken curtain of his white hair. His height means he’s bent a little forward to reach her, and she finds she likes the feeling of being surrounded by him—it’s safety on each side, almost an embrace.

“Choose a row. Begin there.”

She laughs, the sound escaping her in a sudden burst. “Is that what you’d do?”

Maybe there’s a tiny tilt to his mouth when he speaks next. She can’t tell. 

“Possibly,” he says, and then he is pressing a kiss to the shell of her pointed ear. Gentle. Careful. Deliberate. 

She turns her face to his—his infuriatingly straight nose affectionately skims her forehead, her hairline. “Are there some I should avoid? Any forbidden fruits?”

His organic hand is at her waist, his palm resting at the small of her back. “No,” he says softly. “Though forbidden to some, not to you.”

And that is when she realizes, with frightening conviction, that she loves him.

  
  
  


──────

  
  


She could spend the remainder of her years trying to unravel the conundrum of Sotha Sil.

He is not incapable of appreciating beauty—on the contrary, he has a discerning eye for it. He doesn’t use the word itself often, but when he does, his voice takes on a tender, reverent quality that reminds her of prayer. It’d happened when he’d emerged from the seat of his power in the Cogitum Centralis, awake and whole, and first spoken to her. 

“Broken. Impoverished,” he’d said about the City and Tamriel at large, his scarlet eyes mournful, and then in a hushed aside: _“Beautiful.”_

If his curse is certainty, hers is empathy. She’s seen the way others look at him. Sometimes, Luciana can’t contain her resentment, the charge of her soured loyalty; the Apostles worship him, most of them blindly, without question; and some of the denizens of the City fear him, the way every person fears the unknown. 

Velai understands the reasons for each of these views: she has imagined, in some silent, private moments, what it would have been like if Sotha Sil had refused to save her own son. Her own dark-haired, smart-mouthed, tall son. She’s been lucky to watch her boy grow—he’s vigorous and hale, inventive and curious, the greatest gift Nirn’s ever seen fit to bestow upon her. Darsis is a man—has been for some time, now, with his own wife beside him and adventures behind him—but she still misses him the way she did when he was but a babe and out of her sight for a scant handful of minutes. That is the burden of motherhood; the love does not diminish, it only grows. 

Luciana didn’t get that chance. Marius died young, in agony, in his mother’s arms. There is no logic on any plane of Mundus that would be able to quell the misery of that, to calm the rage of knowing it could have been stopped.

If it had been Darsis instead of Marius, losing that mortal battle to his malformed heart, and her instead of Luciana, helpless to do anything but watch, she would have begun to hate Sotha Sil, too. 

But it was not her, and she does not hate him. She cannot.

Those bonds of love—familial, fraternal, romantic, filial—they are life’s most wonderful triumph. 

Navigating without them would be a barren, bleak task, and the exertion of it is evident in Sotha Sil, even if others believe him to be untouchable and above the mire of feeling. He is not overtly-expressive, it is true; he approaches anything that calls to him with a methodical solemnity that reminds Velai of a pallbearer. She has, however, glimpsed past that. There are instants of clarity, little hestitances when the part of him that is Mechanic and Architect melts away, and all that’s left is a very vulnerable melancholy—that which barely hovers at the surface of him and his consciousness, understood by most to be a divine detachment from everything. It is not. 

He is a builder, eternally endeavoring to find something better. Something stronger. Something safer. 

Yet, his City is not a haven. It’s a reflection of the world beyond the Vault, in every way. Imperfect, but improving. A noble experiment built on ignoble foundations. It is what it is, and always will be.

_A mirror. Nothing more._

“Seht,” she says to him, a whisper in the dark, “one day I will be gone, and so will you. Nothing can change that.”

He shifts, turning to her, his face inscrutable in the shadows. “I know,” he says quietly.

She reaches out across the bench and takes his brass hand in both of hers, warming the metal with her palms. “You called me altruistic—when I asked you to save Luciana.”

“Because you are,” he murmurs. “A rare trait.”

“Maybe,” Velai concedes. “Maybe I am more greedy than I am altruistic. Because I wanted her to live longer, laugh more, though she’s in so much pain. That might be cruel of me. But I think we should all have that chance. Even you. Especially you.”

He glances down at their entangled fingers. “You are obstinate, as well.”

“Definitely,” she says, with a smile. “I realized long ago that you do feel for them. Love them. Your people, that is. Every path we walk may end in the same destination, but you care nonetheless. I want to ask a favor of you, Seht.”

His hand squeezes around hers. “Ask, then.”

“There’s a certain comfort in knowing how a story concludes,” Velai goes on, swiping her thumb over his knuckles. “Sometimes I just flip to the last bit of a book to spare myself the anticipation. It must be a lot like that for you—the knowing—just without the reading. Do you think that you might allow yourself to enjoy what is happening despite what _will_ happen?”

He shuts his eyes, like he’s collecting himself. Waiting long for an answer from him is an anomaly, if not an outright impossibility—he’s always so forthright and wordlessly, resignedly assured. 

When he looks at her again, his gaze is glassy. 

“I will try,” he admits. 

She lifts his hand, kisses the back of it. “That’s all any of us can do,” she says. 

  
  
  


──────

  
  
  


She often falls asleep in the Dome while he works and reads—so often that he’d had a pair of factotums move a cot into the library months ago. 

On nights when the memories won’t leave her alone, she just appears, apparently out of thin air, on noiseless feet, and takes her place on the cot; she swathes the coverlets around her, reclines, and keeps to herself. He does not mind her as an audience—her questions, if any, tend to be amusing in the least, and clever at best. The company is not unpleasant. She does not treat him like an idol, obscure and empyrean. There’s an addicting immediacy about her, something anchoring. 

He abandons the treatise he’d been perusing when he hears her beginning to doze off. 

She grins reflexively at his drawing closer, stretching out a hand.

Sotha Sil takes his place beside the cot, hovering inches above the ground with his legs crossed beneath his tunic, and slips his palm over hers. 

“Do you ever rest?” she mumbles in a drowsy voice.

“You have inquired before,” he responds.

She huffs out half a laugh. “Might get an answer someday.”

“Sleep,” he says. 

“Bossy, bossy,” she admonishes, though her eyelids are drooping and have slid shut by the culmination of that sentence.

She is not like him: she requires regular, uninterrupted intervals of slumber to ensure her continued health, though she seems averse to acknowledging that reality. It must be easy for her companions to mistake her energy for physical strength; but deprived of food and respite, Velai would collapse, the same as any mortal. 

Her breathing lengthens and deepens. Soon her grip on him has slackened, and she’s surrendered to the summons of dreaming. 

Sotha Sil looks at her. At her proportionate face, with its strong lines and its myriad of scars. They’re everywhere on her, healed-over and velvety: on her chin, running down to her neck, on her cheeks, over her arms and legs, on her back, around her wrists, lifting a corner of her full mouth into a permanent almost-smirk. An account of survival, written in skin, like a map of constellations confessing the path of stars. 

He looks at her hair, fine and tousled, dark as obsidian. She wears organic flowers in it often—red flowers, the color of garnets, like her eyes. It’s idiosyncratic, that a person touched by so much death chooses to surround herself with such life, is so fascinated with it. She stands out among the factotums and the fabricants and the Apostles in the City, in the Elegiac Replicant with its mechanical flora and cogwork trees. He does not mind it. 

He looks at her hands, lean and gnarled and delicate. They cradle books and blossoms and wield deadly daggers.

She is the Prisoner That Freed The World. She is just Velai. She is precious—startlingly enough, subjectively, too.

Perhaps it would be alright to stop for a heartbeat. Sotha Sil lets his eyes close. 

He will never be here again. How sad. How wondrous. But he will remember. And in that way, she will live forever.


End file.
